What we don’t know

Yesterday, when I was in Akron, Iowa, for that big event it seemed easy to recall that “on top of the world” feeling a new graduate possesses, how at that very point you feel like you might just know it all.  But I also remembered how quickly that fades. You go to college or enter a vocation and you live and learn.

This weekend brought to mind the adage, “The more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t know.”

And that’s exactly the sense I get when we talk about how to get more CAB-qualifying cattle.

Myth: We’ve studied marbling for so long, there’s no point in researchers going over it again.

Fact: In the past couple of decades, the concentration of research on end-product traits has certainly intensified. As the market and business have placed more economic importance on things like marbling, the academic community has placed more importance on studying all the factors that affect it.

I’ve read the abstracts, listened to the presentations and done the interviews. I know there are hundreds of smart people who are digging into the science behind all those things that make you more money on a grid.

One of those is muscle biologist Brad Johnson. A couple years ago we were talking about how implants do nothing to improve carcass quality, and for the most part knock it back a peg, and he said he envisions a future where that’s not the case.

“We’ve tried to embark on a series of research trials here recently at Texas Tech that have investigated the how’s and why’s of steroidal implants impacts on marbling. We know they have profound effects on skeletal muscle growth. If we can unlock some of those mysteries of what’s going on then we can manage it. We could still benefit from the improvement in productivity and efficiency of these tools and try to mitigate the negative effects on beef quality, like marbling.”

How cool would that be?

Then he threw around terms like adipoblasts, mesenchymal precursor cells, transdifferentiation. (Needless to say, I had to do a little decoding before I wrote “Efficient, high-quality beef”) But the point is, this is all stuff that they didn’t know five, ten, fifteen years ago. So imagine what those same researchers will know a decade from now.

Check out this video clip to hear from Brad yourself, as he talks about what they’re up to and why.

May your bottom line be filled with black ink,

Miranda

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